Re: UA style sheet for <q>

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 4:49 PM, Simon Pieters wrote:
>
> It's *|:lang(...) > q instead of q:lang(...) to handle quotes in different
> languages correctly, although I don't know if it handles nested quotes in
> different languages correctly

Probably not, as I've been told (probably read on this list, otherwise
during researches on the Web) that quotes from foreign languages in an
English document should use English quotation marks (even at the
second level).
(I seem to remember someone thus proposing "html:lang(en)" as a
selector to attach the "quotes" property to: html:lang(en) { quotes:
""" """ "'" "'" } )

> and it certainly doesn't handle French quoting
> rules correctly, where the end quote and start quote should be omitted when
> split up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle_quotes#French

Wouldn't it suggest the inserted text be marked up as a child of the
Q, rather than really splitting the Q in two?

   <q>C'est une belle journée pour les Montréalais<XXX>, soutient le
ministre</XXX>. Ces investissements stimuleront la croissance
économique.</q>

which could be styled as (omitting language-sensitive information):

   q::before { content: open-quote; }
   q::after { content: close-quote; }
   q XXX::before { content: close-quote; }
   q XXX::after { content: open-quote; }

But other aspects of French style are not supported either (not only
related to quotations):

   Il répondit : <q>Ce n'est qu'un <em>gadget !</em></q>

if you choose to use guillemets for <em>s (<em> might not be
appropriate here, but it certainly isn't a <q> either), is rendered as
follows:

   Il répondit : « Ce n'est qu'un « gadget ! ».

(second 'close-quote' omitted)


And of course, there's still the "problem" of "kerned" punctuation (in
the first example above, the comma comes after the » while in en-US it
would come before the ")

> I was thinking of setting up a wiki page somewhere for this so people can
> fix and expand on it, if we decide to go down this road.

I'm really not so sure <q> should generate quotation marks *by default*
(and I'm sorry for the IE team, though I guess using "content:
open-quote" without previously setting the "quotes" property would
have the same result, i.e. use their language-sensitive defaults)

-- 
Thomas Broyer

Received on Thursday, 30 October 2008 16:29:26 UTC